Gold Could Be The Next Libor Scandal

The Libor scandal is so 2012 you guys, so so boring, but thank goodness we have a brand new market-rigging scandal to enjoy now, one that will entertainingly interest the hyper-paranoid: Yes, the next Libor scandal is in gold.

Believe it or not, the global benchmark prices for gold and silver, the “London spot” prices, are not set by such old-timey folderol as “trading,” but by a small cabal of European banks that get together twice a day and decide what they think the price of gold and silver should be.

If that sounds familiar to you, then you win the prize for staying awake through all of last year’s tedious stories about the Libor scandal. The gold-pricing process is in fact akin to the process of setting the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, a key short-term interest rate. In that case, a slightly larger group of banks sets Libor each day by self-reporting their borrowing costs, and it turns out they had constantly manipulated it for years and years…>>MORE>>(Huffingtonpost)